The Department of Health’s ‘nudge’ campaigns, aimed at changing doctors’ prescribing and billing behaviour with strongly worded letters, are being investigated by the Australian National Audit Office.

Over the past two years, the department has sent tens of thousands of letters to doctors over their alleged overprescribing of antibiotics and opioids or inappropriate billing of Medicare.

The letters were devised by the department’s Behavioural Economics and Research Team (BERT) and Provider Benefits Integrity Division and used psychology in  an attempt to influence doctors’ actions — usually by offering statistics on how they compared to other doctors.

So far, only the results from BERT’s 2017 letter campaign to the 30% of GPs with the highest rates of antibiotic prescribing have been published.